>Which is nice on paper but is functionally worthless for virtually all shareholders unless AMZN pays a dividend, no? The only way to generate wealth from AMZN right now is to give it to someone else for more money than you paid for it. If you bought AMZN 20 years ago for retirement, you'd still be waiting for that asset to produce anything on its own. For fun, compare that to the East India companies which paid up to double digit dividends from year one.
Of course when an investor buys single stocks he is taking on the risk that the company has to survive until it pays out dividends or does stock buybacks. However, literally everyone knows and understands that risk. Everyone has heard about companies going bankrupt. This is why you are supposed to have a portfolio of a variety of stocks. Employees who receive stock compensation want to avoid the risk that their employer will disappear and they lose their job and the stocks both at the same time.
But if we assume that Amazon is not paying out dividends right now because it is still growing (I don't know, haven't checked since I consider Amazon to be an awful company) then it would grow its ability to pay out dividends in the future. There will be one day in the future that Amazon will stop growing and then be forced to just pay out the profits. If it turns out that the margins at the end are super thin and it can't pay enough dividends to justify its market cap then the value of the stock will simply go down because investors sell their stock and look for companies with growth potential. This will happen until the value of the stock is low enough that the valuation of the company is entirely based on dividends.
>pure speculation on an asset which currently does not produce anything on its own -- and has no guarantee that it ever will.
This is an undesirable property of the stock market, at least if you were to ask the central bank or government or me. With Bitcoin, this is actually considered desirable because there is nothing to it other than speculation.